Page breaks on group are even worse. Underneath, no matter how they're coded in a report engine (any report engine), in some scenarios their assumptions and expectations collide with yours, or your users'.

I have three groups and have followed the steps in your 6/3/07 MSDN post. This works great except for one thing... when I choose to page break on Group_3, each Group_2 and Group_1 footer appears on its own page.

I got around this in Crystal Reports by using a conditional page break and the NEXT function to see where the group I was; however, SSRS doesn't offer a similar function. It does offer a PREVIOUS function, but I get an error that an aggregate cannot be used in a group.

I'm going to cut out some cross-talk here, in which it turned out that Ryan's problem wasn't as straightforward as it may sound above. Suffice to say, I did a number of different renditions for Ryan, each of which didn't meet his needs in one way or another. With one thing or another, I did 10 revisions of his original example before I got everything right.

You gotta understand, in these pro-bono advice engagements, there is a little thing called "gathering requirements" that doesn't get done thoroughly. There are aspects to the task that I assume the user will know how to do (or the developer will know how to extend) themselves, so I don't fully work things out. And then there are details of the results that the user assumes I will know are critical, just by looking at an example or report design, so s/he doesn't express them.

On both sides, we are probably expecting too much of each other.

Oh, wait. It's not only pro-bono advice engagements that have this issue. Is it?

Early on, it appeared that the major issue was in getting the right group totals. If you put a conditional page break group outside the "real groups", as I did in the MSDN post to which Ryan refers above, this forces your "real groups" to break, and your group totals will only include the values inside the page break group instead of the full aggregate for the group.

I tried a lot of fancy ways around this, including (believe it or not) a subreport whose whole purpose was to supply subtotals. That was iteration 3, and it actually worked pretty well, I thought. It took the calculation of subtotals out the current report, where they were no longer hampered by the group breaks.

Whether that solution was a brilliant idea in terms of performance I'm not going to say, considering Ryan wrote back saying the result still wasn't right. He wanted the headers for all three of his groups to repeat on page, but he didn't want the subtotal footer lines to repeat except when the group was actually finished, whether it appeared on multiple pages or not.

I went nine rounds with this, and finally said "to heck with trying to get SSRS groups to do something they don't want to do".

When groups aren't working... don't use 'em.

You never really need group bands. You can almost always figure out what logic you wished they were using, in terms of "when should a row display", and apply it yourself, on a detail row. That's what I ended up doing here.

You also really don't need the report to aggregate data based on groups. You can always get SQL to get you the subtotals you need, and display them appropriately in your ersatz group bands (aka conditionally-appearing detail rows). Sure the SQL has to be slightly fancier, but it's probably going to be slightly faster too.

Before we begin

A propos of nothing...

I'm not exactly sure what report expression gave Ryan that error he mentioned, but it's plausible.

You can sometimes get around it by using the exact same behavior as the aggregate function would have done by replacing it with a very small amount of custom code to accumulate or calculate values.

While this tactic wouldn't have resolved Ryan's layout requirements in this instance, it's relevant to my general point in this post: sometimes you have to think like the report engine (or how you wish the report engine would think), and do the work yourself, rather than relying on the exposed functionality in the Designer.

Walkthrough for Rendition 10

Ryan very kindly supplied a sample report and stored procedure based on AdventureWorks at my request, so I could share all this with you.

The three groups are Department, Manager, Employee. A parameter specifies on which group (or none) he wants to pagebreak for a given run.

The first thing I noticed about Ryan's report is that the inner group on Employees wasn't actually a standard group at all. He was hiding the details rows, using the counterintuitively named Visibility property, and using a footer line with CountDistinct(Fields!Orders.Value) in it. In other words, he only showed a count per employee, not individual orders, in his report. The effect is similar to a REPORT FORM ... SUMMARY command, for those of you who have used the VFP Report system at some point.

Instead of using the Visibility property and adding Group_3 for Employee, Ryan could have used a detail-level group, selected footer, and taken out the detail row entirely. As it turned out, that part didn't really matter, but it's worth mentioning that you really don't need the report to evaluate Visibility on every details row if you just want to tell it "no details". This is one of the cases in which detail grouping really makes sense, even though it's a weird concept.

Report result sets are often severely denormalized. I knew exactly what I wanted in terms of nested totals, all I had to do was get them in the right rows so that they were easily accessed. The fact that they would also appear on rows where they were not needed was not a big concern. (Sure, it's a waste. So is a subreport.) So here's my revision (try not to faint, or even to get over-involved, the details are specific to the example):

-- here are the additional columns that I've added to Ryan's-- original result set (just tack them on to the end of the table-- you saw earlier):

Orders

OrderRowPerEmployee

OrderRowPerManager

OrderRowPerDepartment

Count Orders Per Employee

CountOrdersPerManager

CountOrdersPerDepartment

55274

1

1

1

21

40

40

50244

2

2

2

21

40

40

...

59064

21

21

21

21

40

40

55298

1

22

22

10

40

40

...

59045

9

40

40

9

40

40

55243

1

1

1

124

256

1107

...

Before you say anything about how you could improve the above procedure... I know you could. And so can Ryan, especially given that Ryan doesn't happen to need the individual orders in this case.

I wasn't fixated on the best possible code here. I am not overly intimate with the AdventureWorks schema, and am not invested in it. There's no need, because AdventureWorks probably looks nothing like Ryan's real data set (or yours). Besides, maybe in real life sometimes Ryan does need the individual orders, or their equivalent, even though in the example he didn't.

All I'm concerned about is what you see in the final comment in the code listing above: I want to hand the right results to my report definition, so it doesn't have to figure much out. How you get there, in your data schema, is your business, and might be entirely different. OK so far?

Now we have the information that our report needs to figure stuff out. Keep in mind that what we're doing here is probably very similar, logic-wise, to what group bands do "under the covers"; we're just going to do it manually.

Here is Ryan's original group setup. Based on my recommendations in the MSDN forum post, he's got an outer group handling the page breaks, and he has the group breaks you might expect within it.

You don't see any bands for the outer group in the layout, because it has no visible result. It's just there to provide a single band on which a page break is requested. If you recall, the conditions for the conditional page break instructions are based on a parameter in this example, so the group expression will look something like this:

In my version, I'm using the same parameter condition, of course, and the conditional group break expression is the same one you see above.

As you can see, I've removed the Department, Manager, and Employee groups. I added a group to handle some outermost band chores, rather than using a table header and footer. This group has a group expression of ="". I've used Nothing and 0 or other literals too.

This additional band is not necessarily germane to the conditional page break technique, but I often find it is convenient and makes a table more manageable. In this case, by the time I got to Rendition 11 (if you have the stamina to keep on reading), you'll find that I really needed it.

My headers in OuterBandGroup are set to repeat on new page as well, because we want them to. My footer rows in the same group are not set to repeat on new page -- because we actually just want the total orders at the end of the full report. Accordingly, the Total Orders footer row (please note: not individual textboxes!) has a Hidden expression that looks like this:

=RowNumber("SalesOrders") <> CountRows("SalesOrders")

... a simple expression which indicates that we only want to see this row when we're at the end of the dataset.

That was pretty easy. Now we have to accomplish pretty much the same thing on our ersatz group headers and footers which, as you can see in the layout, are all expressed in detail rows.

Remember Ryan's requirements? Repeat the headers on page, but don't repeat the footers on page. And remember what Ryan said? RDLs have a PREVIOUS() function. Given these facts, how does an ersatz header line know to repeat?

You need to tell each header line that it must be hidden unless either the page has changed or the group break value for this level has changed.

The row will show when you're on the first record, and it will show whenever you've changed Departments, no matter what the conditional break situation. But when you've set an inner group to break on page and the Department has not changed, it will not show.

The Manager row header has the same Hidden expression as you see above, except that we're comparing Fields!Manager.Value expression to its Previous version, instead.

NB: I suppose I could have done something with Hide Duplicates, instead. But I didn't think of that. There's always more than one way to skin an RDL cat.

The next row down is the actual "detail row", which shows the count of orders per employee. Its Hidden expression says "hide if we're not on the last record for this employee":

Note that, instead of using a CountDistinct RDL function for display purposes, we're just using the value we got from SQL to in a textbox for this line, which you see in the right side of the Hidden expression above. Similarly, the textboxes in the Manager footer row and the Department footer row have textboxes displaying fields straight from the SQL:

=Fields!CountOrdersPerManager.Value

and

=Fields!CountOrdersPerDepartment.Value

All that's left is the suppression of these ersatz group footer lines when we don't want to see them. We only want them when the theoretical group has changed. As you can probably guess, the Manager footer row has a Hidden expression that looks like this:

And it's all over but the wrangling over grow/shrink/spacing handling in your specific layout.

Rendition 11

I really thought I was done at this point, but Ryan then added a last-minute curve of sorts:

P.S.As a side note, I will also be including a " continued" tag on the subsequent group headers.I mention it now only because I don't know how simple/difficult it is to incorporate into the changes already made...

Okay... at this point, what's an extra hour, right? I added a textbox into my visible group header, with the following expression in it:

Department <Sales> and Manager<amy0> continued from theprevious page.or

Department <Sales> continued from theprevious page.or

nothing at all... as appropriate.

I've uploaded RyanPageBreak.zip (55.13 kb) with Ryan's original example report, my #11 solution RDL and SQL, and PDFs showing the results at each pagebreak level, so you can see what this looks like without setting it up, if you like.

Your mileage may vary, and you should think again about which car you should take on this trip

But there's something that annoys me about this whole line of thinking, and it's this: when we're contorting ourselves to get something to work, probably there is an easier and better way.

Ryan says his users want the HTML and printed report to be exactly the same. I hear the same thing all the time, but it's basically nonesense. Different renderers handle group and page breaks as well as they can, within their media, but they will never be exactly the same. HTML pagination is largely arbitrary, based on a theoretical idea of what will fit on a user's screen, while Print and PDF page breaks are a function of an absolute page size. An Excel renderer translates explicit page breaks into worksheet tabs in a workbook. They're not exactly the same; so what?

Maybe we have to let SSRS be SSRS sometimes. Maybe we should ask users to consider using SSRS collapse/expand and document map features to focus their their attention on different summary levels of a report, rather than page breaks; these features work very naturally with groups. Maybe this would be just as good or better at giving them the result they intended when they asked for a page break. These features don't translate perfectly to each different renderer, either, but so what?

Since when was absolute consistency between renditions the real goal? Would users also expect a CSV rendered output to include red for negative numbers? No, of course not. Neither the CSV renderer nor the XML renderer even provide the content of page header and footer bands; they literally have no concept of page breaks at all.

The world is moving on. To be both green and efficient, even the IRS promotes paperless returns, even state agencies allow submission of sophisticated and complex forms using SOAP calls. It's time we looked closely at these expectations and figured out how to manage them realistically.